Sherrilyn Kenyon was this year’s keynote speaker at RWA. The entire speech is available here. It’s an astounding story that will make you cry and cheer. She deserves all the success she’s fought for and achieved.

They wouldn’t let me in the programs. I applied three times to the Creative Writing department and even though I was already published, the professor told me that I didn’t write well enough to be admitted. On the third try, she told me not to waste her time by applying anymore as the slots in her program were reserved for students who actually had futures as professional writers and that my writing… well, sucked. I couldn’t make it in Journalism because they had a typing requirement and my right hand is partially paralyzed. I can’t type on a regular typewriter so I couldn’t pass that test and they wouldn’t let me in even though I was an editor for the paper and a magazine.

While you may be able to measure a person’s aptitude or even their talent, what you can never measure is a person’s determination and their resilience. As my brother so often said it’s not about the size of the dog in the fight, it’s about the size of the fight in the dog.